So perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that it took only three hours and 33 minutes for Protonet, a Hamburg-based startup which has built a “fixed, personal server,” to break a € 1 million funding limit on Seedmatch, a German crowdfunding site. It raised the money so fast that many potential Seedmatch investors didn’t have a chance to throw money at it.

“Madness,” is how founder and CEO Ali Jelveh described the 213 minutes it took to raise the cool million.

But the real pull of Protonet’s server is in taking cloud hosting services out of the hands of the giant cloud services providers, most of whom are based in the U.S.

The not-so-subtle message: Not even the NSA can tap into Protonet’s servers like they do to those of the world’s largest tech companies.

Protonet deploys 2048 Bit SSL encryption, an extremely hard-to-break, new cyber security industry standard encryption certificate that can be used both in a closed local network and on the Internet. “We don’t offer 100% security—nobody can. What we offer is data sovereignty. I can decide who has access to my data and who has not,” company spokesman Philipp Baumgaertel said.

Once up and running, users can access data on a Protonet server using a computer or mobile device network just as they would a standard cloud service, but since the data never passes through a third party, Protonet claims data will be better protected. The servers run Protonet’s own custom version of Ubuntu Linux and comes with services similar to Skype, Dropbox, and other file-sharing programs. In essence, it works as a closed-circuit server, housed by customers on their own premises, and accessed through an invite-only social cloud.

With roughly EUR 500,000 of revenue in 2013, the company has produced two server models ranging in price from € 3,000 to € 4,700, that offer differing levels of storage capacity, working memory, and redundancy. They are now planning on introducing a cheaper device that private users can afford.

In it’s blog posts, the company likes to paint itself as a David battling Goliath, capitalizing on the growing European distrust of spy agencies and big tech giants alike.

The proclivity for local data server storage is also a side-effect of the eavesdropping allegations and privacy concerns on the continent.

But this isn’t the first crowdfunding campaign for Protonet. Their very first funding round started on Seedmatch in November of 2012, when they raised € 200,000 in just under 48 minutes.

“What this all demonstrates is that data sovereignty is important. It’s a message that reaches everywhere,” CEO Jelveh said. The startup is aiming to grow internationally and intends to launch products in the U.S. by 2015.